The Third View on Mujahedin Khalq

U.N. Iraq chief: The countries of the world must take MEK refugees

The United Nations and the State Department have been struggling to convince the Iranian exile group the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) to move to a former U.S. military base in Iraq, but the real U.N. Iraq chief: The countries of the world must take MEK refugees need is for third countries to accept MEK "refugees" on a permanent basis, according to the top U.N. representative in Iraq.

The MEK is a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization opposed to the Iranian regime that has been living in a closed compound in Iraq called Camp Ashraf for years. The Iraqi government has pledged to close Camp Ashraf, using force if necessary, so the U.N. and the State Department are slowly but surely cajoling Ashraf’s 3,200 residents to move to Camp Liberty, a former U.S. military base near the Baghdad airport.

But that’s only a temporary solution. ..

"I have the feeling that the Camp Ashraf residents have made peace with the idea to go to Camp Liberty and they’ve made peace with the idea that there is no future in Iraq and they will leave Iraq," Martin Kobler, the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), told The Cable.

But finding homes for the MEK members when they leave Iraq "is the most difficult part of the story," he said. "The whole process only will succeed if all the 3,200 find countries who will take them into their borders."

The U.N. held a resettlement conference on March 27 in Geneva and the response was "not overwhelming, to say the least," Kobler said.

Part of the difficulty of dealing with the MEK group members at Camp Ashraf is that they have been cut off from the world for years and little is known about their individual histories or whether they would qualify for refugee status. Some reports say that MEK members are still conducting violent attacks inside Iran at the behest of the Israeli government.

The United States is legally barred from accepting any refugees from members of a foreign terrorist organization. There is also no plan for what happens to those MEK members who do not qualify for refugee status.

"We will find a solution then," Kobler said. "Everybody has Iranian nationality and on a voluntary basis can go back to Iran… The question is what happens to them then."

Kobler disputed the claims made by the MEK and its long list of American advocates that the Camp Liberty site is not fit for human occupation.

"Camp Liberty is a place where 5,500 American soldiers lived for many, many years… What worked for 5,500 people should also work humanitarian wise for 3,200 Camp Ashraf residents," he said.

Kobler declined to comment on reports that the MEK is involved in ongoing attacks on the Iranian nuclear program and its personnel inside Iran. He also declined to confirm that U.N. reports have stated that MEK members were intentionally sabotaging the facilities in Camp Liberty in order to make the camp look worse than it is, saying only, "There were big initial difficulties and a lack of cooperation. However this has improved over the last weeks."

Some advocates of the MEK, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have called Camp Ashraf a "concentration camp," a reference Kobler said is insulting and offensive.

"I am a German citizen. To compare the situation of Camp Ashraf residents to the systematic extermination of European Jews during Nazi dictatorship, this is not only historically totally absurd but is an insult to the victims," he said.

"My message to these supporters is, spend your energies not so much on attacking the United Nations or others. Spend your energies to convince your governments to take them into your countries," he said.

While in Washington, Kobler met with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees, Population, and Migration Anne Richards, and Ambassador Daniel Fried, the State Department official in charge of the Camp Ashraf issue.

Foreign Policy

April 17, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

“CYBER TERRORISM”: US-supported Terrorist Group MEK Plants Stuxnet Virus

The international community has eased its condemnation of Iran following recent negotiations between Tehran and six other nations in Istanbul,

"CYBER TERRORISM": US-supported Terrorist Group MEK Plants Stuxnet Virus Malware to Disable Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

Turkey. While the participating parties agreed to further discussions on May 23, 2012 in Baghdad, both Israel and the West have given no indication of easing the strict regime of sanctions imposed on Tehran. Following claims of the Iranian leadership that it pursues civil nuclear capabilities to generate electricity and fuel for medical reactors (allowing Tehran to divert its primary oil reserves to export markets) [1], Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a religious prohibition on nuclear weapons in Iran [2]. During recent discussions, Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili emphasized Iran’s right to a civil nuclear program, as guaranteed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [3]. Although Tel Aviv possess between 75 to 400 nuclear warheads, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak insists that all of Iran’s uranium enriched to 20% be moved to a "trusted" neighboring country [4].

While both CIA chief David H. Petraeus and US National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper Jr. concede that no credible evidence exists to accuse Iran of constructing a nuclear weapon [5], the brazen criminality of intelligence operations against Iran’s civil nuclear program remain deeply troubling. ISSSource has recently confirmed that the individuals responsible for planting the Stuxnet computer worm used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz were members of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) [6], a US State Department-listed terrorist organization (#29) [7]. MEK was founded in 1965 as a Marxist Islamic mass political movement aimed at agitating the monarchy of the US-backed Iranian Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The group initially sided with revolutionary clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but eventually turned away from the regime during a power struggle that resulted in the group waging urban guerilla warfare against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1981.

The organization was later given refuge by Saddam Hussein and mounted attacks on Iran from within Iraqi territory, killing an estimated 17,000 Iranian nationals in the process [8]. MEK exists as the main component of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a “coalition of democratic Iranian organizations, groups and personalities,” calling itself a "parliament-in-exile” seeking to “establish a democratic, secular and coalition government” in Iran [9]. Although the group has been credited with the assassination of high profile US military personnel [10] following the Islamic Revolution on multiple occasions [11], The New Yorker reports that members of Mujahideen-e-Khalq were trained in communications, cryptography, small-unit tactics and weaponry by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at a base in Nevada starting in 2005 [12]. JSOC instructed MEK operatives on how to penetrate major Iranian communications systems, allowing the group to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran for the purpose of sharing them with American intelligence.

Following the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi Army has twice attempted to enter Camp Ashraf, a “refugee camp” where the militant wing of MEK (consisting of approximately 3,200 personnel) resided under external security protection of the US military up until 2009 [13]. With the full support of the US Embassy in Iraq and the State Department, UN special representative in Iraq Martin Kobler has organized efforts to relocate MEK insurgents to a former US military base near the Baghdad airport, amusingly titled, “Camp Liberty” – to avoid violent clashes between the MEK and the Shiite-led Iraqi government [14]. The group has long received material assistance from Israel, who assisted the organization with broadcasting into Iran from their political base in Paris, while the MEK and NCRI have reportedly provided the United States with intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program, which publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility in 2002 [15].

While senior figures in the Council on Foreign Relations describe MEK as a "cult-like organization" with "totalitarian tendencies,” [16] a cabal of elder statesmen such as former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley K. Clark, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former 9/11 Commission Chairman Lee Hamilton were paid $20,000 to $30,000 per engagement to endorse the removal of the Mujahideen-e Khalq from the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations [17]. NCRI head Maryam Rajavi, now based in Paris and endorsed by statesmen from the United States and European Union, is famously quoted saying, "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards," during Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Iraqi Kurds in 1991 [18]. Despite the documented cases of atrocities committed by MEK forces, the Council of the European Union removed the group from the EU list of terrorist organizations in 2009; NCRI spokesperson Shahin Gobadi offered, "All we want is democratic elections in Iran," in a press statement to mark the event [19].

Although current and former US officials agree Iran is years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead and has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of UN nuclear inspections [20], recent revelations connecting MEK with the Stuxnet computer virus that destroyed several hundred centrifuges in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility constitutes an act of deliberate and unparalleled sabotage. Stuxnet remains the most sophisticated malware discovered thus far, the virus targets Siemens’ Simatic WinCC Step7 software, which controls industrial systems such as nuclear power plants and electrical grids from a Microsoft Windows-based PC. The virus exploits security gaps referred to as zero-day vulnerabilities, to attack specific targets. Prior to its discovery, Stuxnet was previously undetected and remained unidentified by anti-virus software, as the malware was designed to appear as legitimate software to Microsoft Windows. Upon delivery of the Stuxnet payload, the malware manipulated the operating speed of centrifuges spinning nuclear fuel to create distortions that deliberately damaged the machines, while giving the impression of normal activities to the monitoring operator and disabling their emergency controls.

ISSSource has cited current and former US intelligence officials, who confirm the Stuxnet virus was planted at Natanz nuclear facility by a saboteur believed to be a member of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq [21]. By delivering the malicious payload via USB memory stick, the group was able to damage at least 1,000 centrifuges in the Natanz nuclear facility [22]. MEK has also been accused of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists [23] and triggering an explosion that destroyed an underground site near the town of Khorramabad in western Iran that housed most of Tehran’s Shehab-3 medium-range missiles [24]. NBC News reports that Israel provided financing, training and arms to members of Mujahideen-e Khalq, who are responsible for killing five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 using motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars [25]. The New York Times reports that former US President George W. Bush authorized covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s Natanz facility, after deflecting an Israeli request to shower specialized bunker-busting bombs on the facility in 2009 [26].

Due to the intricate nature of Stuxnet coding, security experts confirm its creation must the “work of a national government agency” [27]. Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert who dismantled Stuxnet credited Israel and the United States with writing the malicious software designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program [28]. Considering that Stuxnet targeted Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) used in industrial plants to automate industrial operations, the malware designers required detailed knowledge of the programming language written for PLC components to successively subvert them [29]. It remains significant that the German electrical engineering company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States in 2008 to identify vulnerabilities in the computer controllers identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities [30]. Intelligence experts concede that testing of the Stuxnet virus was conducted in the Dimona complex located in Israel’s Negev desert, the site of Israel’s rarely acknowledged nuclear arms program [31].

When asked about the Stuxnet worm in a press conference, current White House WMD Coordinator Gary Samore boasted, “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated” [32]. While former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Hans Blix challenges the IAEA’s own reports on Iran’s nuclear activities (accusing the agency of relying on unverified intelligence from the US and Israel) [33], former director of US nuclear weapons production programs, Clinton Bastin, has sent an open letter to President Obama regarding the status of Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons [34]. Bastin reiterates in his letter to the President, “The ultimate product of Iran’s gas centrifuge facilities would be highly enriched uranium hexafluoride, a gas that cannot be used to make a weapon. Converting the gas to metal, fabricating components and assembling them with high explosives using dangerous and difficult technology that has never been used in Iran would take many years after a diversion of three tons of low enriched uranium gas from fully safeguarded inventories. The resulting weapon, if intended for delivery by missile, would have a yield equivalent to that of a kiloton of conventional high explosives” [35].

The theatrics of the US and Israel in their condemnation of Iran’s nuclear power program have come at a heavy price for the Iranian people, who have been subjected to sanctions, assassinations, condemnation and sabotage. The United States has produced more than 70,000 nuclear weapons between 1951 and 1998 [36], while Israel possess a nuclear weapons stockpile ranging from 75 to 400 warheads [37]. The current legal international framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty guarantees the right to conduct peaceful nuclear energy programs; the deliberate provocations of the United States and Israel acting through intelligence groups such as Mossad and the CIA constitute the most genuine contempt toward international law, security and the value of a single human life. The mainstream media have worked to indoctrinate the population of the English-speaking world with an exploited and romanticized version of the Iranian theocracy’s ideological ambitions to wage “unprovoked terror,” while figures such as Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi publically renounce nuclear weapons [38].

The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or the People’s Mujahedin of Iran is an organization responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians since its inception. If the US and Israel launched a war against Iran, aggressor nations would likely recognize the touted “parliament-in-exile”, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, as the nation’s legitimate government. The US State Department’s own website (which features Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as Foreign Terrorist Organization #29) indicates that “It is unlawful for a person in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to knowingly provide ‘material support or resources’ to a designated FTO” [39]. As the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq continually seek removal from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations [40], the group’s unpardonable offenses must not be lost to the annuls of history. While NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi would prefer to masquerade as a “pro-democracy” figure, the responsible parties of the international community must rightfully condemn the actions taken by her organization and its affiliates.

The Stuxnet virus was engineered with Iran’s nuclear program in mind, as 60% of global Stuxnet cases appear within Iran [41]. US intelligence sources indicate that American and Israeli officials are working to finalize a new Stuxnet worm, referred to as ‘Duqu’ [42]; Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Russia’s Kaspersky Lab examined drivers used in Stuxnet and Duqu and concluded a single team most likely designed both worms, based on their interaction with the surrounding malware code [43]. Duqu malware similarly exploits Microsoft Windows systems using a zero-day vulnerability and is partially written in an advanced and previously unknown programming language, comprised of a variety of software components capable of executing information theft capabilities highly related to Iran’s nuclear program. Duqu has the capacity to steal digital certificates to help future viruses appear as secure software [44]. Duqu’s replication methods inside target networks remain unknown, however due to its modular structure, a special payload could theoretically be used in further cyber-physical attacks [45]. As the world begins to wage warfare in currency markets and programming code, the demand has never been greater for a new international legal framework to rightfully penalize covert provocateurs for manipulating economic structures and engaging in acts of sabotage.

by Nile Bowie

Notes
[1] Iran’s Nuclear Program (Nuclear Talks, 2012), The New York Times, April 9, 2012
[2] Six-party talks ‘encouraging’ after 15-month break, Russia Today, April 14, 2012
[3] Iran, world powers agree to further nuclear talks, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2012
[4] Barak doubts sanctions will halt Iran’s nuke drive, The Jerusalem Post, April 7, 2012
[5] U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb, The New York Times, February 24, 2012
[6] Stuxnet Loaded by Iran Double Agents, ISSSource, April 11, 2012
[7] Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Bureau of Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, Janurary 27, 2012
[8] Moqtada Sadr Reiterates Iraqis’ Demand for Expulsion of MKO Terrorists, Fars News Agency, September 19, 2011
[9] About the National Council of Resistance of Iran, The National Council of Resistance of Iran, 2010
[10] Massacre at Camp Ashraf: Implications for U.S. Policy, Committee on Foreign Affairs, July 7, 2011
[11] Iran vows capture of officers’ killers, The Free Lance-Star, May 22, 1975
[12] Our Men in Iran? The New Yorker, April 6, 2012
[13] Former U.S. base opened to Iranian terrorist group, Foreign Policy, February 7, 2012
[14] Are the MEK’s U.S. friends its worst enemies? Foreign Policy, March 8, 2012
[15] Iran nuclear leaks ‘linked to Israel’, Asia Times, June 5, 2009
[16] Massacre at Camp Ashraf: Implications for U.S. Policy, Committee on Foreign Affairs, July 7, 2011
[17] Mujahideen-e Khalq: Former U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating For Terrorist Organization, Huffington Post, August 8, 2011
[18] The Cult of Rajavi, The New York Times, July 13, 2003
[19] EU ministers drop Iran group from terror list, EUobserver, Janurary 26, 2009
[20] SPECIAL REPORT-Intel shows Iran nuclear threat not imminent, Reuters, March 23, 2012
[21] Stuxnet Loaded by Iran Double Agents, ISSSource, April 11, 2012
[22] Did Stuxnet Take Out 1,000 Centrifuges at the Natanz Enrichment Plant? Institute for Science and International Security, December 22, 2010
[23] Report: U.S. Officials Tie Controversial Iranian Exile Group To Scientist Assassinations, Center for American Progress Action Fund, February 9, 2012
[24] Triple Blast at Secret Iranian Military Installation, Virtual Jerusalem, October 15, 2010
[25] Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News, MSNBC, February 9, 2012
[26] U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site, The New York Times, Janurary 10, 2009
[27] Stuxnet worm is the ‘work of a national government agency’, The Guardian, September 24, 2010
[28] US and Israel were behind Stuxnet claims researcher, BBC, March 4, 2011
[29] Code clues point to Stuxnet maker, BBC, November 19, 2010
[30] Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay, The New York Times, Janurary 15, 2011
[31] Ibid
[32] Ibid
[33] Blix: US, Israel source most of IAEA allegations, PressTV, March 25, 2012
[34] Iran has a Nuclear Power, Not a Weapons Program, 21st Century & Technology, December 2, 2011
[35] Top US Nuclear Expert Tells Obama: There Is No Weapons Threat From Iran, LaRouche Pac, February 25, 2012
[36] 50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons, Brookings Institute, August 1998
[37] Nuclear Weapons – Israel, Federation of American Scientists, January 8, 2007
[38] Iran: We do not want nuclear weapons, The Washington Post, April 13, 2012
[39] Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Bureau of Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, Janurary 27, 2012
[40] Iran exile group MEK seeks US terror de-listing, BBC, September 25, 2011
[41] UPDATE 2-Cyber attack appears to target Iran-tech firms, Reuters, September 24, 2010
[42] Stuxnet, Duqu Link Grows Stronger, ISSSource, January 3, 2012
[43] Ibid
[44] The Day of the Golden Jackal – The Next Tale in the Stuxnet Files: Duqu Updated, McAfee, October 18, 2011
[45] W32.Duqu – The precursor to the next Stuxnet (Version 1.4), Symantec, November 23, 2011

April 17, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization

An Iranian mystery: Just who are the MEK?

How do you get a group described by the US government as a cult and an officially designated foreign terrorist organisation to be viewed by many congressmen and parliamentarians as champions of human rights and secular democracy?

It would challenge even the most talented PR executive.

The starkly differing perceptions of the MEK or People’s Mujahideen of Iran could be a case study in the power of image management – of what can be achieved not with guns but by the way information is disseminated.

The organisation has a history of ideological and tactical flexibility.

Since the 1970s, its rhetoric has changed from Islamist to secular; from socialist to capitalist; from pro-Iranian-revolution to anti-Iranian-revolution; from pro-Saddam to pro-American; from violent to peaceful.

Former members consistently describe participating in regular public confessions of their sexual fantasies”

And there is another dichotomy – it has admiring supporters and ardent critics.

Take, for example, the US military officers who had to deal with the MEK after they invaded Iraq in 2003.

Not only was the MEK heavily armed and designated as terrorist by the US government, it also had some very striking internal social policies.

For example, it required its members in Iraq to divorce. Why? Because love was distracting them from their struggle against the regime in Iran.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former UN ambassador John Bolton and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge have spoken in favour of the MEK

Gen James Jones, President Obama’s first National Security Adviser, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have called for the MEK to be removed from the list of terrorist organisations

Howard Dean, a former Democratic presidential hopeful, has called on the US government to recognise Maryam Rajavi as the legitimate president of Iran.

And the trouble is that people love their children too.

So the MEK leadership asked its members to send their children away to foster families in Europe. Europe would be safer, the group explained.

Some parents have not seen their children for 20 years and more.

And just to add to the mix, former members consistently describe participating in regular public confessions of their sexual fantasies.

You might think that would set alarm bells ringing – and for some US officers it did.

One colonel I spoke to, who had daily contact with the MEK leadership for six months in 2004, said that the organisation was a cult, and that some of the members who wanted to get out had to run away.

And yet another officer, who was there at precisely the same time and is now a retired general, has become an active lobbyist on the MEK’s behalf.

With his open smile and earnest friendly manner, he is a good advocate. "Cult? How about admirably focused group?" he says. "And I never heard of anyone being held against their will."

We later emailed him about a former member who claimed to have told the general to his face that people were held against their will. "He’s lying," the general replied.

You just have to decide which side to believe.

Ex-MEK member Eduard Termado is now living in Germany.
His face is scarred to the point of being misshapen. His complexion is grey, his skin blotched and waxy, and his forehead constantly covered in dribbling beads of sweat – but then he spent nine years as a prisoner of war in Iraq.

He joined the MEK hoping to help Iranian democracy and did not like what he saw.

He says that after three years he asked to leave, but was told he couldn’t. He stayed for 12 years.

He now says joining the MEK was the biggest mistake of his life and he has expressed that feeling in an unusual way.

Founded in 1965, began armed struggle against the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1971
Massoud Rajavi has been leader since 1972 – but has not been seen in public since 2003
His wife, Maryam Rajavi, is the public face of the MEK in her role as president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
3,400 members now based at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, but the Iraqi government wants them to leave
The MEK killed six US armed officers and civilian contractors in Iran in the 1970s
The group remains on the US terrorist list but has been removed from the EU list

He has married and produced three children. "My family is my protest against the MEK," he says.

There are many other stories.

Children who never forgave their parents for abandoning them. Children who did forgive and are now joyously reunited. Divorcees who have got out of the organisation saying they still love their former spouses who are still in.

In over 25 years of reporting, I have been lied to often enough but, as successive former MEK members told what they had been through, their tears seemed real enough to me.

And yet a significant number of politicians in the US and UK would say I was tricked because the former MEK members who spread these kind of stories are, in fact, Iranian agents.

Again, who to believe?

In the US in particular, an impressive array of public figures have spoken in defence of the MEK.

There are more than 30 big names – people like Rudy Giuliani former mayor of New York, Howard Dean at one time the democratic presidential hopeful, a retired governor, a former head of the FBI.

Many get paid. Of those who have declared their earnings, the going rate for a pro-MEK speech seems to be $20,000 (£12,500) for 10 minutes. But then many other prominent MEK supporters act without payment.

Why do people take such strong positions on the MEK?

After a month talking to people on both sides of the argument, I am left thinking this. Some supporters are paid, others see the MEK through the prism of Iran – they will just support anything that offers hope of change there. Many are well motivated but some are naive.

And the former members?

Some are embittered, others just seem broken.

Which is when it occurred to me – the perception people have of the MEK may say more about them than about the organisation itself.

It is so difficult to pin down you can see your own reflection in it.

By Owen Bennett Jones

April 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

USA registers MEK as FTO and then trains them in Nevada State!

According to Seymour Hersh, a dissident Iranian terrorist group (M.E.K.) had been listed in 1997 as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The Pentagon, in 2005, trained USA registers MEK as FTO and then trains them in Nevada State! members of the group in Nevada. These dissident Iranian terrorist were then returned to Iran and “many have engaged in covert activities”.

These Iranian terrorists (M.E.K.) remain on that list today.

The Iranian operatives were trained in communications, cryptography, weaponry, and small-unit tactics over a six-month period, a retired four-star general familiar with the details told Hersh.

The general said the training was done by Joint Special Operations Command(JSOC) who claim they were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.

U.S. officials have denied any role in the killings of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007. However, they have said that the M.E.K. assassins, alleged to have been involved, were trained and financed by Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

A former Iranian M.E.K. official, told Seymour Hersh other M.E.K. defectors trained in Nevada told him their training included communications intercepts.

The U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the know-how to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran and the M.E.K. shared the information collected with U.S. officials.

“Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants,” Hersh reported.

M.E.K. stands for Mujahideen-e-Khalq. It began as a student Marxist-Islamist group in the 1970s that was “linked to the assassination of six American citizens,” Hersh noted.

Presently, they are some Jewish USA congressmen, along with a few congressional zio-stooges who are howling for the de-listing of the M.E.K from the USA registry of foreign terrorist organizations. It’s ironic that those who assist a terrorist organization that is on the USA list of such groups are subject to criminal charges.

Some analysts have suggested that delisting such an organization and bringing them to America could be fatal. As this M.E.K terrorist group who were financed by the Mosaad (Israeli Intelligence Agency), could stage a false flag terror attack on American soil which would be blamed on Iran.

Hence, the Zio-controlled White House would be justified in attacking Iran. And, the diabolical criminal Zionist entity (Israel) would have achieved its objective __tricking America into attacking Iran on their behalf.

by ron abbass , ronabbass.wordpress.com

April 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Terrorism; US rhetoric and politics

Former U.S. Officials Investigated for Receiving Payments to Promote a Designated Terror Group

Jeremiah Goulka, former RAND expert on the Mujahedin-e Khalq, says war hawks from Bush admin. and some Democrats were paid by the group to advance its interests in DC and are being investigated by US Treasury

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

Well, what do the following list of former government officials have in common? People like former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former attorney general Michael Mukasey, former UN ambassador John Bolton, as well as former Republican mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, former Democratic governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, and former governor of Vermont Howard Dean, ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, and retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton? What are all these people have in common? Well, they’re all being investigated by the Treasury Department for material aid, receiving money from a terrorist organization, at least an organization that’s on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list. What’s the organization? Well, the MEK.

Now joining us to talk about what the MEK is and what this is all about is Jeremiah Goulka. Jeremiah is an independent public policy scholar and writer. From 2007 to 2010 he was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he conducted research for the U.S. military and was a lead author of The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum. Before that, he worked as a lawyer in the Justice Department under the Bush administration. And let me add he has now become a critic of much of the policy he used to work for. Thanks for joining us, Jeremiah.

JEREMIAH GOULKA, PUBLIC POLICY SCHOLAR: Thanks for having me.

JAY: So give us a quick, first of all, rundown just what the MEK is, for those who haven’t followed the story, and then we’ll get into what the heck are all these officials doing taking their money.

GOULKA: Sure. The MEK is an Iranian dissident group. It was founded in 1965 by several graduate students at the University of Tehran. Their goal was to fight against the regime of the Shah, which they saw, accurately, as a puppet of the U.S. government. Soon the Shah’s regime found out about them, suppressed them pretty brutally. And one leader survived prison, whose name is Massoud Rajavi. In the Iranian Revolution there were lots of different dissident groups, not just Ayatollah Khomeini’s group.

And as the leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, Rajavi tried to participate in the new government. He

wanted to run for president. Several members of the MEK wanted to run for the Majlis, which is the Iranian parliament, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s government pushed the MEK out of the running. And in response to that, the MEK turned against the new government, and it did so violently. The result was that the new government brutally suppressed the MEK, its leaders went into exile in France, and its members went underground in Iran. So this is 1981.

Fast forward to 1986, and you’re in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. The MEK’s leadership makes a deal with Saddam Hussein, the starter of the Iran-Iraq War, which was an absolutely catastrophe for Iran. The deal was that Saddam would provide weapons, some territory within Iraq, in exchange for the services of the MEK. The services that they would render would be providing some soldiers, particularly providing some intelligence and interrogation of Iranian POWs. In exchange for this, what the MEK was going to get in the bargain was the power of Saddam’s military, in their hope to install themselves as the new government of Iran.

Well, this failed. Historically it was their biggest mistake, because the Iranian people saw the MEK essentially as traitors by signing up with the instigator of that horrible war. The MEK, you know, voluntarily crossed the border into Iran and fought against Iranian soldiers. In fact, they launched an invasion after the ceasefire in that war. So the Iranians basically have no—there’s no support for the MEK, not much support. The MEK claims that there’s a lot, but it’s not true. The government still hates the MEK, but that’s a side matter.

JAY: And why were they put on the terrorist list?

GOULKA: So in 1997, after the creation of the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, MEK was one of the first couple to be put on there. One—well, the factual predicate for them being on there is that they assassinated several Americans in Tehran back during the Shah’s era, specifically three military officers and three civilians who were military contractors. They also did various attacks against American interests and assassination attempts during the time. And the MEK have been violent until just a few years ago, doing lots of attacks against Iranian targets, government targets, mostly in Iran but occasionally in Europe, even in the U.S., with some bystanders as casualties. The MEK also make a point of saying that the MEK was added to the FTO list as a political reason, because the Clinton administration was trying to make nice with the government, at the time, in Iran, which was perceived as being more moderate. And, well, of course, it’s a political list and political actions by governments, so I think that there’s probably some truth to that, but that doesn’t make it not true that the [crosstalk]

JAY: And why did they stay on this list during the whole Bush administration years, when we know that Bush—the Bush administration was actually putting a lot of money into trying to have this sort of terrorist fund subversive types of activity in the border regions of Iran? I mean, there’s lots of stories that the CIA and others were promoting this kind of stuff, so why not take them off the list?

GOULKA: Well, there’s a bit of having your cake and eating it too. The government could—the Bush administration was able to keep—by keeping the group on the list, they have more of a negotiating point with the group. You know, it’s a carrot to offer the group if they’ll kind of play nicely. That’s part of it.

But it also was not like there was a monolithic point of view in the Bush administration about the MEK. When I was at the RAND Corporation and did my interviews for the report that you mentioned in the introduction, I spoke to dozens of U.S. officials, and the points of view varied. The people who were of the strongest on to Tehran type attitude, who wanted to invade Iran, they saw the MEK as a potentially useful ally, in the sense of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And there were several people who were sort of fooled by the MEK’s excellent press relations that it’s been doing since leaving Iran in 1981, where they have this thing called the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is the political arm, which has been selling themselves as a liberal, democratic, human rights respecting organization that could go in and be the new—either be the new government or help create a new democracy in Iran. It’s very much like how Ahmed Chalabi sold himself in the Iraqi National Congress.

JAY: I mean, what evidence is [there] that they’re not liberal, democratic, and so on and wouldn’t play this role?

GOULKA: Well, what we’ve said in the report and has been said by others, such as Human Rights Watch, is that the group actually is a cult. So this is another part of the history. Starting in 1985, Massoud Rajavi, the leader, married Maryam Rajavi, who was the wife of one of his colleagues in the MEK, and the two of them turned the group into something of a cult of personality. This became—started in earnest when they were in the desert in 1986, in the desert of Iraq, fairly isolated, and they had a hard time recruiting any new recruits after their participation with Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War because they had lost their support in Iran.

So the new members who were joining after that time, at least some of them cannot be believed to have been true volunteers. But from a lot of former members I spoke to, it appears that lots of them were actually duped into ending up at MEK camps—promises of jobs, wives, and help of getting asylum or residency rights in other European countries. So you have lots of people who have now been trapped in these Iraqi camps, MEK camps in Iraq, and have been enduring various forms of cult behavior, such as sexual control, thought control, brainwashing, limited access to other media, limited food, limited sleep, make-work projects.

JAY: And there’s supposed to be celibacy and various sorts of things, unless you’re the leading couple, I guess.

GOULKA: Exactly. That’s one of the big parts of it is the mandatory divorce and celibacy,—

JAY: Of course, no one—.

GOULKA: —as well as gender segregation.

JAY: Now, what evidence is there that they have been, over the years, conducting terrorist actions against Iranians, Iranian officials? Is there evidence of assassinations or such?

GOULKA: Well, they took credit for it for years. The difference happened after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that—well, actually, they say that as of 2001 they stopped committing violent attacks, that they’ve decided to basically change course and pursue what they were doing with more of a kind of a democratic approach. Starting in 2003, that became more in earnest, as they were now being—actually taking—. Well, it’s a confusing thing to describe, and I explained it in the RAND Corporation report, that when we invaded Iraq in 2003, the perception of the U.S. government was that the MEK was going to participate with Saddam as, quote,”a wholly owned subsidiary”, end quote, of the Saddam army, when there was a quick ceasefire soon thereafter and the U.S. consolidated the MEK at one of its several camps near the Iranian border. And since then there has been a very focused effort by the MEK to earn U.S. pleasure, approbation. And of course this makes sense, because in 2003 you had the administration saying on to Tehran. And so the MEK quickly realized that Saddam failed to put them into power into Iran—maybe the U.S. could.

JAY: So, again, just to be—are there specific examples of how this organization qualifies to be on the terrorist list?

GOULKA: So they’re putting a big push now to get off of the list. And, of course, getting off of the list matters, because that frees up their ability to raise money, and they would certainly use it to make it seem like the U.S. actually supports them. But what they’re using—one of the ways that they say they should not be on the group—on the list is that they say that those assassinations back in the ’70s were done by a splinter group or a different MEK, and that they’re not, you know, responsible for those, and therefore they don’t fall under the requirements of the act. And since Iran has not been an ally of the U.S. in many, many years, therefore attacks done against Iranians don’t count as being against the interests of the United States or its allies.

JAY: And that—I suppose that is the true definition of how United States looks at terrorism: if it’s against an ally, it’s terrorism; if it’s against an enemy, it’s not terrorism. So within the lines of Washington rhetoric and politics they may not be so wrong.

GOULKA: Exactly. And, of course, that raises the issue now that since their goal is—. Their immediate goal is to get off the FTO list, but their big goal is to get into power in Iran, and they want to use the United States’s military to get that. So as they’ve been promoting the fears of a nuclear Iran—the MEK in 2005 were the ones to have a press conference announcing to the public the existence of the Natanz nuclear facility. You know, as a side note, then that information came to them, it appears, from the Israeli government, which wanted also to have this be put into the public arena, and the U.S. already knew. But the MEK’s been waving the flag of fear about Iran since then.

And why do they want this fear promoted? It’s to get the U.S. to invade Iran to put them in power. And I can’t think of anything that would be more against the interests of American national security than for us to actually have an actual invasion of Iran. Considering the tragedy of the Iraq War, to expect anything else other than a protracted occupation and reconstruction would be foolish.

JAY: The MEK is still on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list. And now you’ve got all these government officials taking money and essentially—what is it?—they’re getting paid for speaking engagements and they’re lobbying to get the MEK off the list. But that in theory is illegal, is it not?

GOULKA: In theory. So the material support law created in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 is something that’s been viewed from the start as having a very low threshold of activity to count as being material support, and that’s a, you know, federal crime. And this law has been sort of broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court since then, and so you’ve seen a number of people who have gone to prison for fairly minor things.

So here you have these prominent former officials taking money to speak on behalf of the MEK at events organized by the MEK. And are they committing a crime? Well, what’s particularly interesting here is: on one end you have the notion of equal enforcement of a law. If you’re going to enforce it against Muslims in America, why would you not enforce it against prominent public officials? And, you know, we can wonder then about the impunity that prominent powerful officials can enjoy.

On the flipside, there is a First Amendment question here that, aside from their taking money and doing this in concert with a designated foreign terrorist organization, they are—these officials are making their own political statements, and maybe those should be protected by the First Amendment.

So I think this does raise questions about how well tailored that statute actually is.

JAY: But that’s quite a different thing, to take money and have your say, taking money from—or taking money from a terrorist organization or a foreign government. There was just a Pakistani fellow who I think just got sentenced to two years ’cause he was taking ISI Pakistani money to try to lobby in the United States and—but hadn’t declared himself, you know, an agent of a foreign government and such. I mean, similar issues. Once you take money, you’re not in the same category as just free speech, no?

GOULKA: That’s true. But, of course, money and speech have been heavily linked in the last few years.

JAY: Yeah. So what—just to final—to sum up or to end with, what do you make of the Treasury Department actually going after these guys, including two prominent Democrats? This doesn’t happen without the White House signing off, one would think, and it’s very hard to believe such serious high-level people get investigated and the White House doesn’t get consulted. What would be their interest in pushing this?

GOULKA: Well, I think you’re right that no bureaucrat is going to go step on the toes of prominent officials like this without serious approval from above. I mean, I can attest to that from when I used to work at the Justice Department. I think that—just speculating, I think this is probably linked to what Obama said in his AIPAC speech, that there’s a lot of loose talk of war, and I see this as being a statement to these officials that they need to watch their step. They’ve responded by giving public speeches since, so they are saying sort of bring it on, we’re going to keep doing this. But it—you know, we’ll see what actually happens.

JAY: They’ve responded by making public speeches that they got paid for? Or just public speeches?

GOULKA: I don’t actually know, but they were at at least one MEK-organized event where these folks have been paid to speak previously.

JAY: The MEK is able to organize events in the United States even though it’s on that list. How is that?

GOULKA: Oh, they—everything is done through organizations—they claim that they’re not connected to the MEK, that they just happen to have similar viewpoints, they happen to support the MEK. They’re often involved with people who actually used to be members of the MEK or the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the MEK’s political arm, until those were listed on the FTO list, and then they promptly cut their ties and say that they’re independent or have their own new, you know, little think tanks to promote the interests of the MEK. And there is also a group called the Iran Policy Center that was founded by several ex-Reagan officials that has been promoting the interests of the MEK for the last while, and, you know, they have to pay close attention to not running afoul of the law. How exactly that’s happening, how we’re doing that, I think the Treasury Department’s checking that out.

JAY: And I guess the next step—if this gets serious, at some point the Justice Department steps in. If there’s going to be any charges, does it come from the Justice Department? Or can the Treasury Department actually lay charges?

GOULKA: Well, as I understand it, the Treasury Department can take action such as freezing accounts. But if there’s going to be actual criminal charges, that’s in the Justice Department’s field.

JAY: And then that’s when we’ll find out how serious they’re really pushing this.

GOULKA: That would be a big step.

JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Jeremiah.

GOULKA: Thanks so much for having me.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Download Terrorism; US rhetoric and politics

April 14, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US trained Iranian ‘terrorist’ group

The United States’ Joint Special Operations Command (JSOT) conducted training for the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group listed by the US as a terrorist organization, journalist Seymour Hersh claims.

The Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas, was the site of extensive military and intelligence training for the MEK, in addition to elite Iraqi combat units, Hersh writes in The New Yorker. The training is believed to have been covertly sanctioned by the Bush administration, and was stopped shortly before President Obama took office.
“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official said. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications — coordinating commo is a big deal.”

Hersh’s article quotes a retired four star general who advised the Bush and Obama administrations on national security issues. The general noted that Iranians associated with the MEK received “standard training in commo, crypto, small-unit tactics and weaponry.” He also said he cautioned the JSOT that the Iranian government was very good at counterintelligence and that the US could end up in a lot of trouble if the training program was discovered.

Former and present intelligence officials, Hersh states, also note that US has been providing the MEK, directly or indirectly, with arms, intelligence and logistics since 2003.

But it turns out that the US is not the MEK’s only ally. A former senior intelligence official said Israel cooperated with the MEK to conduct a number of sabotage operations inside Iran, including pipeline attacks. Last month two senior Obama administration officials told NBC News that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, trained and financed MEK units that organized the assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists. MEK spokesmen have denied this claim.

Delist or not delist?

The MEK is a formerly radical Islamic-Marxist movement, labeled a “cult” by Human Rights Watch and listed by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, alongside Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

In the meantime, more and more public figures, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, have been pushing for the MEK to be delisted as a terror group. But experts note that the US would be better off not delisting the MEK if it is to continue its alleged close ties.

“On the one hand, the MEK was relisted year after year after year in the eight-year duration of the Bush administration, and it’s been relisted since Obama came into office,” Reza Marashi, research director of the National Iranian American Council noted on RT’s Alyona Show. “So it might just be as easy as, if we’re going to continue to cooperate with this group directly or indirectly it doesn’t really make a difference if they’re on the terrorist list because this was so close-hold until recently. This wasn’t readily available information even to people inside the US government.”

Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award.

April 12, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Recent story on U.S. training terrorists in Nev. is shameful

It has been revealed that under the Bush administration the United States helped train a terrorist group that has been linked to the deaths of Americans and Iranian nuclear scientists. This was revealed after investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh filed a story a blog for “The New Yorker” linking the U.S. to the terrorist group MEK. Members of MEK were trained in Nevada and have been used as “surrogates” in Iran for the U.S., according to Hersh.

Recently, the MEK was linked to the killings of several Iranian nuclear scientists that sparked public outrage by Iranians and some in the U.S. The U.S. claimed it had nothing to do with the murders in Iran, however, since the story has emerged it has been proven that the U.S. helped train the individuals in the group responsible for the killings of the scientists. This presents quite the paradox for the U.S.: We fight terrorism abroad in the name of freedom, yet we train terrorists on our own soil. The irony of this occurring during the Bush Administration, which stripped citizens of basic civil liberties with the Patriot Act, is unexpected, but not surprising.

MEK has been on the state department’s list of terrorist organizations for the last 15 years. There is an overlap here. While the MEK was on the state department’s list, they were being trained secretively in at a Nevada base in 2004 and early 2005. Hersh said the U.S. tends to “encourage insurrection abroad” in Iran by groups like MEK to further its intelligence regarding the Iranian regime. The MEK has also been linked to using explosives that were created by the U.S., most notably in the case of the Iranian nuclear scientist. “It’s not an accident that these weapons can be traced to the Navy Seals,” Hersh said in an interview on “Democracy Now!.” The training of MEK stopped under the Obama administration.

Hersh’s work deserves praise. In an age dominated by corporate media afraid of stories that reveal wrong doings of large businesses and the U.S. government, this story reveals that the U.S. is not how it always says it is. Although we claim to fight terrorism it seems that with this, we bolstered it by training assassins on our own “free” soil.

By The Parthenon – Marshall parthenon

April 12, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

For Official Washington, Terrorism Is a Laughing Matter

Just how serious is Washington about battling terrorism? The airwaves fill regularly with sanctimonious declamations about terrorist threats and with vows to pursue the war against them to its ultimate conclusion—a war without territorial limits, and with ill-defined opponents and no clear time horizon. A forever war. But to insiders, it is evidently a laughing matter. Developments the past week suggest that for some prominent Washington figures, rubbing elbows with a scheduled terrorist organization and taking money from its front groups is a no-brainer. It may be that they know something most of us don’t about the intelligence community’s dealings with these terrorists.

The State Department scheduled the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahideen of Iran (MEK) as a terrorist organization in 1997. Regularly described as a cult, the group mixes Shia Islam, Marxism, and rituals venerating its charismatic leaders. While these leaders claim to have renounced terrorist violence, they have a history of advocating violence to accomplish religious and political objectives. The MEK earned its place on the State Department’s list based largely on an assassination campaign that targeted American military personnel in Iran in the mid-Seventies. Three military officers and three defense contractors were murdered in MEK-linked attacks: Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins (USA), Colonel Paul Shaffer (USAF) and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner (USAF), as well as William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard, who were in Iran working with Rockwell International on the NSA’s Ibex System.

It is unlawful to accept funds from the MEK or to support the group materially, yet its supporters managed to stage a conference in Washington this past week. Among those appearing were Mitchell Reiss, a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and former attorney general Michael Mukasey. Both Reiss and Mukasey openly joked that they were potentially committing a criminal offense by aiding a scheduled terrorist group.

Why would Washington political figures publicly associate themselves with a terrorist organization? It might be because they know that the United States itself shelters, arms, trains, and supports the same group—and that prosecutors would therefore face a quandary in going after them. The covert relationship between the MEK and the U.S. military and intelligence communities has not been very covert. The official U.S. account is that following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the MEK was disarmed and confined to a former Iraqi military base, Camp Ashraf.

American intelligence figures familiar with the arrangement paint a different picture, noting that U.S. forces housed, armed and protected the MEK in Iraq. After the American withdrawal, Iraqi forces raided Camp Ashraf. American officials scrambled to find new lodgings for the MEK, ultimately placing them at the U.S.-maintained Camp Liberty, near Baghdad Airport. American officials are now said to be arranging the relocation of MEK forces to a new facility constructed for them in Kurdish northern Iraq, close to the Iranian border.

The New Yorker’s Sy Hersh recently succeeded in documenting more of the MEK relationship with the JSOC, the Pentagon’s covert intelligence operation. Hersh takes us to a site in the Nevada desert sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas:

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K…. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Hersh notes that the Obama Administration halted the MEK training programs. Since Obama’s team came to office, however, the organization has ramped up its efforts to move the president’s policies back into line with George W. Bush’s. This explains the aggressive outreach, including generous speaking fees and trips abroad, to political figures in both parties. The MEK plainly wants to align itself with the United States in a coming war against Iran, by establishing itself as a source of intelligence and perhaps as an instrument of black operations.

Indeed, with the United States waging a covert war against Iran, the MEK may already be in the thick of things. NBC News recently reported that the MEK is collaborating in a carefully orchestrated and remarkably effective Israel- run campaign to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. Former CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar recently wrote a blog post indicating that he considers the report credible. He notes, moreover, that the assassination campaign can be considered classic terrorism, applying the definition used by the U.S. government.

Those arguing for the MEK to be delisted as a terrorist group claim that their 1970s assassination spree was the work of a fundamentally different organization. The modern MEK, they argue, is fully aligned with American foreign-policy objectives and is well-positioned to assist the United States in a coming military confrontation with Iran. In particular, they say that the MEK has provided essential intelligence about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which the U.S. intelligence community generally believes was curtailed in 2003.

These claims may all be true, but they don’t convincingly address the MEK’s historic use of terrorist tactics, its pattern of human rights abuses, and its culture of violence. Moreover, the Iraq War should have left Americans wiser about émigré groups who peddle evidence of weapons programs as a rationale for the invasion of their homeland and for their eventual installation as a new and friendly government.

The Obama Administration may be caving in to the political pressure brought by the MEK’s well-compensated Beltway friends. The State Department has reportedly suggested that if the MEK’s leadership accepts resettlement in northern Iraq, this will be counted as another factor in support of delisting. If the MEK succeeds in this goal, America’s posture as an opponent of terrorism will be a laughingstock, and will demonstrate that in Washington today, a little bit of cash, prudently spread, can accomplish almost anything.

Harpers

April 10, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Former US Representative Patrick Kennedy Paid by MEK Terrorists

Unimaginable treason, shamelessly defended

First seen on DeadLineLive: March 20, 2012 – In an astounding interview uploaded on August 29, 2011 by Think Progress.org, former US Representative Patrick Kennedy is asked about his appearance at a rally on behalf of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (#29). He shamelessly declares that not only was he paid a sum of 25,000 USD to appear at the rally, but that he also believes in MEK’s “cause.”

Don’t forget to check out our article covering how U.S. officials have confirmed that the Israeli Mossad is training terrorists and running their operations in Iran, largely through the MEK.
Kennedy would further astound us by claiming Iranians are “exporting” rocket propelled grenades and IED’s (improvised explosive devices) to “kill Americans.” He states, “you could never pay me enough to be on the side of any group that is killing Americans,” apparently oblivious to the fact that MEK is listed as a terrorist organization specifically because it has indeed killed Americans.

He would then go on to implicate several other co-lobbyists working with him, claiming that he stands with “a whole array of military leadership” in his support of MEK.

US State Department-listed foreign terror organization, Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Image: A screenshot from the US State Department’s website showing MEK listed as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (29. Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)). Paradoxically the US State Department along with the UN and Neo-Conservative lobbyists have been the sole factor in harboring, training, arming, and keeping in existence this terrorist organization.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate.

To this day MEK terrorists have been carrying out attacks inside of Iran killing political opponents, attacking civilian targets, as well as carrying out the US-Israeli program of targeting and assassinating Iranian scientists. MEK terrorists are also suspected of handling patsies in recent false flag operations carried out in India, Georgia, and Thailand, which have been ham-handedly blamed on the Iranian government.

MEK is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape.

By every conceivable measure, MEK are terrorists who most definitely have American blood on their hands. Kennedy’s defense preys upon what he must believe to be an infinitely ignorant, intellectually sloven audience and makes a mockery out of the 6,000+ Americans who’ve died in the fraudulent “War on Terror.” In a nation which claims to derive its global moral superiority from the “rule of law,” allowing Kennedy and those lobbying with him on behalf of MEK to continue flagrantly violating the law with impunity only further erodes America’s terminally deteriorating legitimacy both at home and abroad.

To understand “Why?” the US is backing a listed terrorist organization, please read: “Israel US: Partners in International Crime: US think-tank admits Iran is not a threat to either US or Israeli security, devises narrative to sell unnecessary war to public.”

April 10, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Confirmed: Terrorist Organization Trained on US Soil by US Military

Ynetnews reported in their article, “US operated deep in Iran, trained assassins,” that, “the New Yorker reported over the weekend that the US trained members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq. According to previous reports, Israel has been cooperating with the group, which allegedly carried out hits on Iranian nuclear scientists.” Ynetnews also reported that US officials doubt Iran is or will be developing nuclear weapons, as has been claimed to justify years of sanctions, covert subversion, terrorism, and unprovoked attacks by the West against Iran.
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Image: Rudy Giuliani consorting with MEK’s political wing leader Maryam Rajavi in Paris, France. Giuliani is best known for his role playing a strong supporter for the “War on Terror” and his incessant fear mongering verses “Islamic extremists.” In real life, he coddles listed terrorist organizations in direct violation of US law and even lobbies for them.

It appears that not only Israel, but the US in tandem with Mossad have been training, arming, financing, harboring, and directing the US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (#29) Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) since as early as 2005 where MEK terrorists were brought to Las Vegas, Nevada to train. The April 2012 New Yorker article, “Our Men in Iran?” by Seymour Hersh, elaborates in detail how the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) trained a listed terrorist organization on US soil before sending them back to Iran with weapons and money to carry out “anti-regime terrorist activities.” MEK is suspected to be behind a rash of assassinations targeting Iranian scientists, as well as handling patsies in a string of international bombings US and Israeli officials attempted to pin on Iran.

And while MEK’s representatives, including a growing lobby in Washington D.C. consisting of some of the most disingenuous supporters of the “War on Terror,” including Rudy Giuliani, former US Marine Commandant General James Jones, Tom Ridge, and Lee Hamilton, claim MEK has renounced “terror,” the entire purpose of training them, funding them, and getting them removed from the US State Department “Foreign Terrorist Organization” list is to allow them to carry out a wider campaign of violence against the Iranian people with even greater US support. In essence – to support terror on an unprecedented scale.

This is stated in US policy think-tank Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” report published in 2009 which stated (emphasis added):

“Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.

Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.”

– page 117-118 of ”Which Path to Persia?“ Brookings Institution, 2009

Clearly the United States, its policy makers, and “elected representatives” are well aware that MEK was, and still is a terrorist organization, targeting not only military and political targets in Iran, but civilian targets as well. The indefensible excuse being used now, is that MEK’s terrorist activities are only being directed at the people of Iran, not the West, therefore it is somehow justifiable.

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MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a true testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate.

MEK today is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh (who was attempting to defend MEK) as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK Camp Ashraf escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape.

With a similar story being uncovered behind Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which has been for decades backed, armed, trained, and directed by the CIA and MI6 under varying banners up to and including NATO’s recent 2011 Libyan intervention – a pattern of using “terrorists” as both a convenient casus belli and as an effective proxy military force is becoming apparent. With LIFG commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj turning up in Syria carrying out a NATO-backed campaign to topple President Bashar al-Assad, it appears terrorist mercenaries in the employ of the West are at work there as well. Tales of “pro-democracy” “freedom fighters” are spun for anyone ignorant enough to believe them, while in reality the violence there is nothing more than the symptoms of neo-imperial machinations.

The War on Terror is a Fraud

The “War on Terror” is a fraud. For 10 years the West, and in particular America’s armed forces have been lied to, misled, and bled dry literally while the American tax payers have been bled dry financially. Americans have resigned their personal freedoms to the “Patriot Act” and the increasingly perverse and invasive Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The corporate-financier think-tanks, like the Brookings Institution, who conspire to train, arm, and fund terrorist organizations we supposedly sent thousands of our sons to die fighting, and who’s “omnipresent danger” we have surrendered our liberties to help combat, do so not for the greater good of the American people, but for the greater good of the corporate-financier sponsors that fund their work.

Image: Some of the corporate sponsors behind the Brookings Institution, who have openly conspired to fund, train, and arm terrorist organizations to carry out regime change in Iran. America is bled to death literally and financially to fight wars of conquest justified by claiming armies of omnipresent terrorists threaten the West’s way of life, when this very army of terrorists is a creation of the corporate-financier oligarchs in Wall Street and London in the first place.

For it is the corporate-financier oligarchs who have made trillions fighting this unending war, who have had barriers such as individual liberty and state sovereignty torn down in their quest for more wealth and power, and who have overturned nation after nation only then to be rolled into their growing Wall Street-London collective. This is modern global empire – its moral imperative one entirely contrived to hide a glaring reality so outrageous even when it is admitted amongst the mainstream press, the general public has no idea, apparently, what to make of it.

It would be suggested, however, that the public identify these corporations, boycott them completely, and replace them with a new, local paradigm with a moral imperative derived from their own personal convictions – not ideology sold to them on the corporate-sponsored evening news.

April 9, 2012 0 comments

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